As most of you will be aware, for some time now Passionford has been suffering from slowdowns in the evening, normally between around 7pm and 11pm during which time access to teh server is slow and you will get critical errors.

This is known to be down to a number of things, or indeed a combination of things, but the main 2 culprits are.

1) There are traffic density problems with the link between UK and France at peak times.

2) PHP software struggles with databases of this magnitude.
(Well over 1.3 gigabyte now)

Now as part of the solution, Pet may well move the hosting server to London, but that isnt going to give us any software solutions, and we do in fact want to move to bigger and better software such as VBull now the site has grown and we have a decent community in place, but there are a few massive hurdles to overcome such as the Gold membership scheme all being custom coded so it cannot be ported across with teh click of a mouse. The ONLY way to move all that info is to do it by hand, person by person, and thats a mammoth task.

Search Facility:
The search facility not working properly is due to the fact that when hubndreds of users at once use it, its affecting our speed so its been culled for the time being.

Now the excuses....
Petrucci and Florence have had Killian, their first child together on 19th July and he is now doing very well, but it wasnt an easy path and Florence almost died during the birth and Killian was in trouble for a very long time after, so i agreed with Pet that he ignore PF and tend to his far more important family matters, which he rightly did, but of course beuing self employed hios work staked up and when he came back to work, he was run ragged for weeks, not easy for anyone.

Around the same time i was moving house, planning a wedding and a honeymoon, so i was up to my ears with all that and the fact i have a business to run and july/aug is peak time, so PF was pretty much left to its own devices for a number of months and, hey, guess what, its still here and your all still alive and well...

These are not excuses really, they are reasons, and i just wanted to be upfront with ou now and tell you why its been left, and explain why the solution isnt exactly simple to implement. Ina n ideal world all the gold members would accept they were going to lose their memberships and have to start again, but hey, thats not going to happen is it? lol

So, onwards and upwards, Pet and I are back on form and, whilst we are both extremely busy with some new business ventures, we fully intend to get things sorted here on PF but you will simply have to bear with us as the solutions are both complex and time consuming so it will NOT be an overnight solution...

I hope that anyone complaining about speed can now be directed to this topic for the time being as we have seen enough complaining lately and just decided we should give you some idea where we are up to with things at this moment in time, so hopefully, no more topics accusing us of buggering off to the Costa Del Sol in Ferrari's on the proceeds of all your gold mberships.